Extract

Trapped in a sexless marriage, flavor extract factory owner Joel (Jason Bateman) is looking for a way to change his life. He gets his chance when employee Step (Clifton Collins) loses a testicle in an industrial accident. Con artist Cindy (Mila Kunis) smells a lawsuit and sets herself up for a scam, catching Joel’s eye in the process. To rid himself of the guilt he would feel in pursuing her, Joel follows the advice of his friend Dean (Ben Affleck) and hires a pool boy (Dustin Milligan) to seduce his wife (Kristen Wiig).



It’s been more than a decade since Mike Judge shook up the white collar world with Office Space. He’s largely flown under the radar (2006’s Idiocracy never got a theatrical release) since then, but another workplace setting was bound to generate some buzz and invite some comparisons. It the case of Extract, these comparisons threaten to turn a perfectly watchable comedy into a dreadfully disappointing follow-up.


Extract is no Office Space. Though they share a writer/director (Judge), plot elements (a scam, pursuit of a dream girl), and a common theme (work sucks), it would do neither film justice to view Extract as an informal sequel. Not only does the newer film fail to measure up (less memorable characters, fewer laugh-out-loud lines), but the two films seem to be doing different things. Office Space was steeped in zeitgeist. Without the Y2K panic and the tech bubble, it couldn’t exist. Factory unrest, on the other hand, has more of a timeless quality. Further, the workplace is incidental to Extract. The movie is really about Joel’s lack of fulfillment and it would be much the same if he worked on a farm or at a car dealership.


Take away the comparisons and what you are left with is a serviceable, albeit conventional film. Bateman makes Joel likeable even when he’s doing dislikable things, and his attempts at rage and frustration are pretty amusing. The usually amusing Wiig plays it disappointingly straight as wife Suzie and Kunis continues to prove she isn’t much of an actress, but there are some good performances in minor roles. J.K. Simmons is delightfully dismissive as Joel’s factory cohort, while Beth Grant steals all her scenes as a lazy, racist, condescending, dim-witted employee. Don’t miss Gene Simmons as a money-hungry personal injury lawyer.


In a world where Office Space never existed, Extract would still probably be a letdown because it does not make full use of the talent involved. Nevertheless, it offers up a down-to-earth, if uneven and somewhat forgettable, of people behaving badly.


7/10

Murder by Death

Lured to the mansion of reclusive billionaire Lionel Twain (Truman Capote), the world’s greatest detectives assemble to dine and solve a mystery. They include wily Chinese Inspector Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers, parodying Charlie Chan), refined British couple Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith, parodying Nick and Nora Charles), food-loving Belgian Milo Perrier (James Coco, parodying Hercule Poirot), hard-boiled San Francisco P.I. Sam Diamond (Peter Falk, parodying Sam Spade), and Englishwoman Jessica Marbles (Elsa Lancaster, parodying Miss Marple). Once the group is assembled, Twain reveals that a murder will occur at midnight and one million dollars will be awarded to whoever is able to solve it.

It’s hard to believe now that hordes of Scary Movie sequels and imitators have ruined their good name, but parody films were once both entertaining and respectable. Released in 1976, Murder by Death ranks alongside Airplane as the best of them. Directed by Robert Moore and penned by Neil Simon, this pastiche of Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett sends up literary and cinematic detectives with humor and style to spare.

The film boasts an impressive cast. In addition to the leads, a pre-Star Wars Alec Guinness serves as Twain’s blind butler, a debuting James Cromwell plays Perrier’s beleaguered chauffer, and Eileen Brennan is Diamond’s flirty secretary. Nobody is slumming here. Falk does hardboiled deadpan to perfection, waving a gun around, accusing everyone in sight of scandalous misdeeds and reaching obvious conclusions with gusto. Sellers gives his Asian stereotype character some sly wit, and frequently draws Twain’s ire for his refusal to use pronouns.
With lines like “One of us will be one million dollars richer, and one of us will be going to the gas chamber...to be hung!” the overall dialogue is some of the funniest ever crafted. It’s also a testament to everyone involved that the laughs increase as the plot becomes more twisted and convoluted.

The one strike against Murder by Death is its muddled letdown of an ending, the ambiguity of which the film itself acknowledges. Simon is clearly trying to make a statement about the genre he’s lampooning, but the negationism he displays here feels cheap and unsatisfying.

Fearlessly irreverent, deviously self-referential, and shamelessly over-the-top, Murder by Death walks the line between clever and stupid with a circus performer’s skill. When all is said and done and the body count totaled, the only true casualty is likely to be your boredom.

8/10

Twilight

In rural 1950s Tennessee, teenagers Kenneth and Corrie Tyler suspect their late bootlegger father didn’t receive a proper burial. After digging up his and other graves, they discover that well-to-do undertaker Fenton Breece has been defiling the dead. Armed with incriminating photos, they intend to blackmail him and ruin his reputation. Breece in turn hires Granville Sutter, a cunning, ill-tempered murderer, to recover the evidence. What follows is a cat-and-mouse chase through the barren backwoods.



About the worst that can be said for Twilight is that it has the misfortune of sharing its title with a series of poorly crafted vampire novels. But unlike Stephenie Meyer, William gay can actually write. His florid, intricate descriptions juxtaposed against plainspoken, quoteless dialogue call to mind Cormac McCarthy, but Gay is more innovator than imitator. Who else would be boldly transgressive enough to present a place where necrophiliacs and maniac killers are accepted as a matter of course?


Oozing with sinister tension, Twilight moves at a swift pace and builds character development along the way. Kenneth’s reluctance and fear make him a believable hero, while Breece is given a comic baffoonish quality to complement his depraved habits. The real star here though is Sutter. Like a white-trash Anton Chigurh, Sutter is self-aware, deceptively intelligent, and ruthlessly determined. One of the book’s more chilling moments occurs when he addresses a woman with a still-living husband as “widow Conkle,” knowing full well what he’ll do and how he’ll get away with it.


An unapologetically dark book, Twilight will alienate some with its cryptic downer of an ending. It remains, however, a well-crafted study of desperation and resolve, of Southern Gothic bogeymen and the decent folk who dare to defy them.


8.5/10

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Thirty-six years after the disappearance of his grand-niece, elderly Swedish industrialist Henrik Vanger hires disgraced financial reporter Mikael Blomkvist to solve the mystery under the guise of writing a family history. Blomkvist is investigated – and later assisted – by Lisbeth Salander, an enigmatic young computer hacker. The more the Blomkvist uncovers, the more danger his discoveries put him in.



Published posthumously and now adapted into a movie, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo couldn’t have asked for a bigger profile. There’s a lot that can be said about it, good and bad, which already gives it a one-up on some titles topping the best-sellers lists.


First, the good: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has an engrossing central mystery and a number of tantalizing tangents (Blomkvist’s love life, Salander’s shady past, Swedish corporate malfeasance, etc.) that give it some breadth. The late author Steig Larsson was a political reporter and his adroitness as a researcher is evident here. The book has a tight chronology and a keen sense of verisimilitude with regard to contemporary Sweden.


While all this suggests Larsson was probably terrific as a nonfiction author, his debut mystery reveals him to be somewhat inept as a novelist. Structurally, this is a mess. The pacing is uneven, the point-of-view occasionally undergoes radical shifts, and the Salander thread is utilized inconsistently throughout. Instead of alternating Blomquvist and Salander chapters, she will disappear from the action for good-sized chunks of the novel, relegating her to the status of a secondary character despite her importance to both the plot and title.


Characterization on the whole is problematic. Blomkvist is neither unbelievable nor unsympathetic, but he comes off as too much of a Mary Sue (or would that be Marty Stungren, in this case), a blatant stand-in for the author. Salander is considerably less believable, and despite her evocative, contradictory nature, not as complex as she should be. She’s the Damaged Girl, through and through. The rest of the cast ranges from one-dimensional pastiches of the spoiled rich to genuinely compelling characters, such as Blomkvist’s beleaguered colleague/friend/lover.


The writing is similarly a mixed bag. There are some nice descriptions of the icy countryside, but plenty of placed where the prose felt stale. As this is an English adaptation of a Swedish book, it’s hard to tell what got lost in translation.


At 460 pages, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo isn’t a huge tome, but it often feels bloated. It’s talky, we get more Vanger family history and Swedish economic miscellanea than we really need to know, and there are too many character names to keep track of. All of this could be taken as Larsson shoring up his foundation, but it really detracts from the tension.


Lastly, Larsson’s anti-capitalist, anti-religious views cast a big shadow on the book. That wouldn’t be such a problem if they didn’t push plot developments into questionable directions. Larsson's determination to "get the bad guy" seems overly contrived in several instances.


For the most part, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is entertaining reading. It’s refreshing to see a mystery that doesn’t take place in some dense urban landscape populated by characters cut from the same hard-boiled cloth (amusingly, Blomkvist reads a number of mysteries throughout the book). And as a debut novel, it shows a lot of promise. However, the aforementioned technical deficiencies are impossible to ignore. It’s a shame Larsson didn’t live long enough to follow his Millennium Trilogy up with more polished and tightly constructed efforts. As such, we’re left with an occasionally enthralling, occasionally infuriating mess of a mystery tinged with fascinating sociopolitical overtones.


6.75/10

Ed Wood

In the 1950s, would-be filmmaker Edward D. Wood Jr. (Johnny Depp) struggles to make a name for himself despite a lack of any discernable talent. A transvestite, Wood ends up making a series of deeply personal low-budget films which are released to widespread critical disdain. Along the way, he befriends and recruits aging horror actor Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau), freakish wrestler Tor Johnson (George “The Animal” Steele) and other outcasts, alienating himself from women, financial backers, and society in the process.



Directed by Tim Burton, Ed Wood is an A-list treatment of a Z-list icon. As a biopic, it plays fast and loose with the facts – children and spouses are omitted, an encounter between Wood and Orson Welles is fabricated, etc. But as a tribute, this is spot-on. Filmed in black and white, the movie opens with a dramatic introduction in Wood’s own schlocky style. The filmmaker’s “rise” is covered, up to and including the production of his “masterpiece,” Plan 9 From Outer Space (often cited as the worst film ever made). This would be a fall from grace in another kind of film, but it’s strangely endearing to watch Wood and Co. triumph in spite of their incompetence.


The biggest payoff here is the discrepancy between what’s happening on the screen and what we as viewers know to be true. Wood’s movies may be trash, but in his eyes, they’re art. That kind of irony requires the cast to not only give convincing performances, but to do so with a straight face. Fortunately, they are up to the task. Depp imbues Wood with relentless, oblivious, never-say-die optimism. He’s counterbalanced by an Oscar-winning Landau, whose Lugosi is drug-addled and well past his prime but still full of gravitas. Sarah Jessica Parker, Jeffrey Jones, Patricia Arquette, and Bill Murray (in a quick appearance as a drag queen) round out this freak show.


Through an unapologetically glib and personal treatment, Ed Wood’s idiosyncratic approach to biography reveals more – good and bad – about its subject than a more straightforward or “neutral” approach ever would. That it’s often hilarious is an added bonus.


8/10

Stone Temple Pilots

This 2010 eponymous release is the hard rock band’s first in nearly a decade. Between Scott Weiland’s drug problems, arrests, and the formation of Velvet Revolver, it’s an unlikely comeback, though “triumphant return” would be greatly overstating the case.

Even in their 1990s heyday, Stone Temple Pilots played second fiddle to the bands they imitated (Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, etc.). This isn’t to say that STP is to grunge what Great White is to Led Zeppelin, but rather that for as good as they played on “Plush” and “Sex Type Thing,” no one would confuse them for innovators. That’s as true of the band now as it was 15 years ago. The new album is energetic and features a number of catchy songs. “Between the Lines” seems destined for heavy radio airplay, though the thumping, hard-charging “Huckleberry Crumble” may be the album’s standout piece. In stark contrast to a number of other disappointing “reunion” albums, it’s clear that the time apart hasn’t diminished the band’s skills.


Unfortunately, there’s little here that’s transcendent. Dean DeLeo is a competent guitarist, albeit not a very imaginative one, and Weiland’s voice begins to grow tiresome after repeated listening. Though there’s credit to be given for sonic diversity, the album’s shift toward tripped-out pop about midway through sounds like a loss of momentum. Lyrically, there are some real duds. Weiland’s revelation on “Between the Lines” - “You always were my favorite drug/even when we used to take drugs” - isn’t exactly a James Hetfield/confront-the-demons moment and “Dare to dare if you dare” practically writes its own jokes.


Rampant mediocrity aside, Stone Temple Pilots is worth a listen for several reasons: it’s not actively terrible, it’ll give you hope that your favorite defunct band may one day reunite and return to form (I’m looking at you, SOAD), and it’s imitative tendencies could turn you on to the music of better bands that it borrowed from.


7/10

Blockade Billy

Interviewed by the author, retired baseball coach George “Granny” Grantham wearily discusses a crazy season some 50-plus years ago. Beset by injuries, his team turns to unknown and unheralded William “Blockade Billy” Blakely. Blakely’s unexpected success turns the team around, but the seemingly simple-minded catcher’s checkered past threatens to get the entire season erased from the record books.

That Stephen King wrote a baseball novella shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Baseball figured heavily in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and he previously co-authored a nonfiction book on the 2004 Red Sox World Series run. What is surprising is how ordinary this treatment is. Even when King steers clear of the supernatural and extradimensional, he has a tendency to ratchet up the stakes so that everything is a matter of life and death, good and evil, hope and despair. Not so with Blockade Billy. While not void of greater thematical significance (this manages to hit some dark and desperate notes, after all), this is a baseball story first, pure and simple. King’s approach to the subject matter is nostalgic to the point of corny, but the author’s legitimate passion is admirably and convincingly conveyed.


Like much of King’s work, Blockade Billy is a page-turner. The storytelling is engrossing, the plot advances quickly, and there’s a legitimately unforeseen (perhaps too unforeseen) twist toward the end. And while this makes for quality entertainment, it doesn’t nearly mask the book’s technical deficiencies. Aside from Granny and Billy, most of the characters are either overly familiar or paper-thin. The team’s ace pitcher, for instance, is a hard-drinking womanizer right out of central casting. The writing is also less than stellar, as much a product of King’s laziness as it is of Granny’s hokey narration.


Blockade Billy is a quick, fun read that will please baseball fans and intrigue King fans, but like a late-innings error in an early-season game, it doesn’t make much of an impact in the grand scheme of things.


7.25/10